The argument about PvP in this thread is interesting. I certainly agree with all my fellow lifelong EQ PvP players that it's not fair to completely abandon a server's needs and then fault people for asking for Dev / GM attention because "Nobody plays there." It's plainly a chicken and egg issue: You want people to play on Zek to prove that EQ PvP is worth investment, but you need to invest in Zek in order for people to want to play there. PvP servers in EQ have a pretty competitive track record when it comes to population during periods when sufficient attention was being paid to those servers. Perhaps not as popular as blue servers, but not ghost towns either. To the extent that Zek was a merged server and eventually declined, well, you can see the same general trend on the blue live servers.
Nonetheless, Gordon Walton, who infamously introduced blue servers to Ultima Online, was definitely on to something when he observed that PvP servers, whatever their longevity, all have the same final outcome: The wolves chase off all the sheep, and then the wolves are left on a depopulated server blaming the developers for the absence of sheep. If you want to put off this result for as long as possible, you need two things: 1, active attention to the server in the form of development changes and rules enforcement, and 2, a good community that permits a variety of playstyles (not just nicey-nice) but nonetheless knows where to draw the line for the health of the server and enforces those norms without GM intervention.
We're no longer in the era of MMO development--especially in EQ--where GMs and developers have a surfeit of attention to give, and we are arguably in the era of online gaming in general when community norms are at their most pathetic (in EQ, just ask people on the TLPs; krono certainly make this worse). I don't think I could effectively argue against someone who says that EQ's PvP servers attract the game's worst scum, in fact. So the notion that Holly et al should be looking at a PvP server is frankly insane, and if so many of us weren't man-babies who wasted 20 years of our lives on the internet, that would be easy to understand. Not to pick on Nirgon--who I played with on RZ and have a lot of respect for, and who didn't mean this as seriously as I'm making it out--but it's borderline dementia to even imagine Holly hiring some veteran PvP player on a volunteer basis to show the company how to do a PvP server right. If you were worth their time, they would already know you from the industry and you would be reaching out to them as a colleague, not an embittered stranger.
Thanks to Elidroth for giving some hard numbers on Zek. Around the time he specified, I was playing there and had guessed it was about 50 active players, so 37 makes sense. And in case DBG staff are still reading this, here's some food for thought: Because of DPS bloat, a PvP server in any previous era of EQ is more fun and more balanced than Live. Since the number of accounts on Zek is so small anyway, perhaps consider closing the server and replacing it with an era-locked server in a previous expansion, so that the 30 or so people who do want an official PvP server can enjoy PvP encounters that take more than a single keystroke to conclude. Apparently the number of expansion sales lost to red players who insist on Live EQ will be very minimal.
